We get asked this more often than you might think, usually by someone weighing up WordPress alternatives, and it is usually put politely: why would I pay for a platform when WordPress is free and does everything?
It is a fair question. It deserves a straight answer rather than a defensive one, so we did the exercise properly. We took the nine jobs our own platform does for the businesses that use it, and worked out exactly which WordPress plugins we would install to do each one. Best in class every time, no straw men, no pretending something is impossible when it plainly is not.
Here is what came back, including the part where WordPress wins.
Start with the part WordPress does better than us
If what you need is a good-looking website with a blog behind it, WordPress is an excellent answer and it is the most widely used website platform in the world for good reasons. The choice of designers is enormous. Most marketing people have used it before. If you fall out with your agency, the next one will already know it, which is a genuine commercial protection and not a small one.
A page builder, a form plugin and an SEO plugin on top of it, and you have a site that will serve a lot of businesses very well for years. Three plugins, a few hundred pounds, done.
If that is the whole requirement, this post is not about you. Use WordPress. We would tell you the same on the phone.
Then you start adding the rest of the business
The exercise gets more interesting when the website is only the front of what you need. Here is the honest mapping, job by job.
Selling online. WooCommerce, and it is genuinely good. Products, orders, payments, delivery, all mature and well supported. Where it starts to strain is not the shop, it is the process behind the shop. WooCommerce assumes a retail journey: paid, packed, shipped. Businesses that survey before they quote, or manufacture to order, or take a deposit and a balance, or book a fitting team, end up adding an automation plugin and a custom order status plugin and bending a shop around a process that is not really shopping.
Email marketing. Plugins like FluentCRM or MailPoet handle lists, subscribers, campaigns and automations perfectly well. You will want a delivery plugin alongside them, because sending marketing email straight from your web server is one of the faster routes into the junk folder. We have written separately about why business email ends up in spam.
Support tickets, internal tasks and a knowledge base. There are good plugins for all three. Ticketing with custom fields, kanban boards for staff tasks, and a documentation system that is honestly the closest match to ours on the entire list. Credit where it is due.
HR. Staff records, holiday and absence can be covered by a general business plugin with an HR module. It is serviceable. It is also generic, and it knows nothing about the rest of your business.
Vehicles. This is where the shopping trip stops. There is no established WordPress plugin for keeping a fleet legal and roadworthy: tax and test expiry, driver walkaround checks, defects, vehicles off the road. You would build it yourself using custom fields and a developer, which means you are paying for bespoke software anyway. You are just paying for it inside somebody else’s platform.
AI. Several plugins bolt a general purpose assistant into WordPress and they work. They will write you a paragraph or generate an image. What they will not do is build a new section of your website in your own design system, correctly branded, because they have no idea what your design system is. A general assistant is not the same thing as one that knows your site.
So what does the finished list look like?
Roughly fifteen to twenty plugins, from around ten different companies.
And that is before the supporting cast that never appears on anybody’s comparison chart, because it is not exciting enough to sell:
- A permissions plugin, so the warehouse cannot see the payroll
- A forms plugin
- A security plugin
- A backup plugin, and somewhere to put the backups
- A caching plugin, because by now the site has a lot to think about
Each one has its own settings screens, its own release schedule, its own support desk, and its own opinion about how your data should be shaped.
The bill arrives in pieces, all year
We are deliberately not going to quote you a total. Plugin pricing changes, the tiers differ, and most of them step up with the number of sites you run, so any figure we printed today would be wrong within a year and you would be right to distrust it.
The shape of it is the point. You are agreeing to somewhere around ten renewal dates, with ten companies, each of which is free to change its pricing, its terms or its ownership without asking you. Nobody in the business will be able to answer “what does our website cost us next year” without going and looking it up.
In pure licence terms it will still probably come to less than commissioning bespoke software, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. The cost that actually hurts is further down.
Somebody has to own update day
Around nine in ten of the security vulnerabilities found in the WordPress world are in plugins and themes rather than in WordPress itself. WordPress core is well looked after. The exposure arrives with the things you add to it, which means it scales with the length of your plugin list.
So every plugin is two things at once: something that can be attacked, and something that must be kept current. The more of them you have, the higher the chance that updating one breaks another, usually on the checkout, usually on a Friday. Somebody has to own that, test it before it goes live, and be available when it goes wrong.
When nobody owns it, updates get postponed because postponing them feels safer than breaking the site. Postponed updates are how most compromised sites get compromised. And if nothing is watching the site, the first person to notice will be a customer.
Nothing knows about anything else
This is the real one, and it is the hardest to see until you are living with it.
A customer rings up. They placed an order last month, they have an open complaint, and they are on your mailing list. In the assembled version, that is three plugins holding three separate records of the same person. The shop knows about the order. The helpdesk knows about the complaint. The mailing list knows an email address. None of the three knows the other two exist.
So the person answering the phone opens three tabs and becomes the integration. That is exactly the same re-keying problem businesses pay us to remove from their back office, arriving through a different door.
It shows up in reporting too. A question as ordinary as “which customers with an unresolved complaint are due to receive Thursday’s marketing email” has no answer without exporting from two systems and comparing them in a spreadsheet. So nobody asks it, the email goes out to everybody, and an unhappy customer gets a cheerful newsletter about a sale.
There are connector plugins that bridge some of these pairs, and they help. They are also more plugins, more licences and more things to break, and most of them copy data between systems on a schedule rather than removing the duplication. You now have the same customer in three places and a robot keeping them roughly in step.
What we are not saying
WordPress is not insecure. Core is maintained properly by people who take it seriously. A well-run WordPress site with a short plugin list and somebody responsible for it is a perfectly sound way to run a website, and there are hundreds of thousands of them.
Plugins are not bad software. Most of the ones in this exercise are made by good teams who support them well. The argument here is about what happens when you own twenty of them at once, not about the quality of any one.
Our way is a constraint too, and you should know it before you buy. We have nine modules. WordPress has tens of thousands of plugins. If you need something we do not do, you cannot simply buy it from a marketplace on a Tuesday afternoon and have it running by Wednesday. Sometimes that means waiting for us. That flexibility is a real WordPress advantage and it is the thing we give up.
And we are not a neutral party. We build and sell the alternative, so read this the way you would read any comparison written by one of the two sides. The plugin list is honest. The conclusion is ours.
WordPress or the alternatives: the question worth asking instead
It is not really “which platform is better”, because that question has no answer without knowing what you are trying to run.
The useful question is: how many of these jobs do I actually need, and do they need to know about each other?
If the answer is one or two and they can stand alone, assembling it from plugins is sensible and it will cost you less. Genuinely, go and do that.
If the answer is five or six and they all involve the same customers, then you are not really choosing a website platform any more. You are choosing how your business systems will be assembled, and buying the parts separately is the expensive route even when it is the cheap invoice. The cost never turns up as a licence fee. It turns up as the person with three tabs open, and the report nobody can run.
If you want to work through which of those jobs you actually need, we are happy to have that conversation. You can see how we have split ours up on the blu::nova platform pages, or just get in touch and talk it through, including the version where the honest answer is that you should stay where you are.